Hack Banshee all Summer for Fun and Profit

As I mentioned the other day, now is a great time to get involved with Banshee, and the deal is even sweeter if you want to work on it full-time this summer and get paid $4,500 through Google's Summer of Code. We have four developers (Bertrand, Eoin, Scott, and myself) willing to mentor, and we have some rocking project ideas we'd love you to tackle:

• Banshee Web Content Make it easy to browse, search, view, and subscribe to content from one or more of archive.org, miroguide.com, spokenword.org, npr.org
• Telepathic Banshee Let users share files and information (recommendations/ratings, current playing info, BPM analysis) with other users on their IM buddy list(s) via the Telepathy communications library and, likely, its Tubes data-transport mechanism. There is already a submitted proposal for this project.
• Recommendations-based Play Queue Modify the Play Queue to have an option to automatically add songs recommended by Last.fm, Mirage, etc.
• Banshee UPnP Add a UPnP extension to Banshee. More info.
• Banshee in Context Show contextually relevant concert info, flickr photos, wikipedia info, etc.

Your application is focused around a particular project proposal, but you can apply multiple times. And you are not limited to the above ideas if you have your own. Feel free to e-mail me personally, e-mail the banshee-list, or chat us up on IRC if you have any questions or want feedback on your application. Make sure you apply with GNOME as the mentoring organization and read the GSoC FAQs. You have a week and two days (until Friday, April 3rd) to apply, so get on it!

An Update on Banshee

A Stable Release Banshee 1.4.3 was released on March 4th. It's a stable release fixing several freezes and MTP device support bugs. Leaping Forward Things are moving ahead at an awesome pace in trunk! Our community members are consistently in the lists of top GNOME bug filers, closers, patch contributors, and patch reviewers. You can keep informed about all their fixes and features landing in trunk in the ChangeLog. I hope we'll have a release from trunk – called 1.5.0, aka 1.6 beta 1 – very soon. We have over two months of awesome fixes and new features to unleash. If you want to hack on Banshee, there has never been a better time. There are more than four of us actively reviewing Banshee patches from long-time regulars and out-of-the-blue newcomers, and we're waiting to hear from you! Bug Reduction Effort A few weeks ago we had over 200 bugs with no response. Today, due to the efforts of our bug triaging team, we have 110. Anybody can help us out by reviewing the list of Banshee bugs, correcting the metadata fields, asking for more information, providing insights, confirming they can reproduce the bug, letting the reporter know somebody is out there and cares! etc. To get started, do a bit of reading, find a bug that looks lonely, and update or comment on it with your thoughts on how to move it forward. Join us in #banshee to get pointers and assurance.